Fast and Loose

10

Stone had a message waiting from Herbie Fisher when he returned to his office.

“What’s up, Herb?”

“The Carlssons have the wherewithal and the borrowing power to buy out the non-family stockholders. Once they’ve got a line of credit with their bankers, all we need do is to draft a letter and some forms, telling the stockholders that they’re offering fifty percent more than St. Clair, and if they want to sell, to sign the documents, have them notarized, and a check will be on the way.”

“Fifty percent more?”

“That’s my recommendation. It’s enough to impress the stockholders and to simultaneously warn Macher that he’s in a bidding war. If we can get this done in a hurry, they can make it a fait accompli before the St. Clair time limit is up.”

“Then set up a meeting with the Carlssons as soon as possible, and let’s outline it for them.”

“I can do it late tomorrow afternoon.”

“That’s good for me.”

“I’ll make the call.”

Five minutes later, Herbie called back. “Five-thirty tomorrow in the elder Dr. Carlsson’s office.”

“You’re on.” They hung up. A convenient time, Stone thought.

Joan buzzed him. “Dino on one.”

Stone pressed the button. “Dino?”

“None other. I ran Erik Macher through the computer. Ready?”

“Ready.”

“He’s forty-nine years old, born in Queens, educated in the public schools, four years at Fordham, where he was introduced by a priest to a CIA recruiter. He vanished into the Agency, did his twenty years, took his government pension, and fled the premises. I don’t know what he did while he was there.”

“I know — he was in covert ops and had a reputation as an assassin.”

“Training he put to use, if what we already know about him is true.”

“Right.”

“He had a couple of brushes with the law along the way — a barroom fight that he won all too handily, charges dismissed when his victim refused to testify against him. The other was more serious — a woman accused him of rape, and the DA had a good case, but the victim left town before they could haul Macher into court. The case just sat there, until the statute of limitations ran out.”

“Anybody ever hear from the woman again?”

“Nope.”

“You think he used his Agency-acquired skills to make sure she didn’t show up?”

“Would you be surprised?” Dino asked.

“Nope.”

“Me neither. He would have done serious time if it had gone to trial.”

“So he’s clean.”

“Yep. I’m sure St. Clair would have checked before he hired him.”

“I’m sure he did,” Stone replied, “and I’ll bet St. Clair was attracted by both charges. He wouldn’t have wanted a squeaky-clean character for the job he had in mind.”

“Have you talked to Mike Freeman at Strategic Services about him?”

“No, but that’s a good idea.”

“Dinner tomorrow?”

“I’m booked, how about the evening after?”

“Done.” They hung up.

Stone called Mike Freeman and was connected immediately.

“How are you, Stone?”

“Pretty good. I want to pick your brain.”

“Shoot.”

“What do you know about somebody called Erik Macher?”

“St. Clair’s muscle?”

“That’s the one.”

“You know he was Agency.”

“That, I know.”

“He applied for a job here when he left the Agency, so we did a pretty good work-up on him.”

“And what did you find?”

“Hang on, let me fire up the computer.” Stone could hear the clicking of a keyboard. “A couple of blots on his copybook — the first, a fight in a pub, during which he nearly disabled the other guy, who wouldn’t testify. The second, a murder.”

“The woman he raped? That turned up on his rap sheet.”

“We concluded that he murdered the woman.”

“But you couldn’t prove it?”

“Nope. A female body turned up four months later in a fifty-five-gallon drum that washed up on a beach in Jersey. Cause of death was a shattered vertebra that could have resulted from a hanging or the attentions of somebody who was trained in the art of assisting a person to break his neck. A positive identification couldn’t be made.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah, that certainly put us off. We never made him an offer.”

“How’d he take it?”

“I don’t know, we just wrote him a turn-down letter and never heard from him again. Later, I heard he had been hired by Christian St. Clair to assemble a private security group, with him as its only client. Frankly, I suspect that Macher had a hand in every shady thing we heard about St. Clair in subsequent years. And now he’s running the company.”

“So I hear.”

“You know, if he hadn’t been sitting a few feet from St. Clair when the explosion happened, he would have been the prime suspect.”

“I can’t argue with that,” Stone said. “Thanks, Mike, this is all good to know.” The two men hung up.

Stone called Dino.

“Yeah?”

“I thought you might like to update your file on Macher.”

“You got more info?”

“Mike Freeman had some.”

“Shoot.”

“Four months after Macher’s rape charge, the body of a woman turned up in an industrial drum on the Jersey shore, with a broken neck as the cause of death. It was too far gone for identification.”

“Not even teeth? The teeth never go away.”

“Beats me. Macher had applied for a job at Strategic Services at the time, and Mike figured the body was that of Macher’s accuser, though he couldn’t ID her.”

“Well, that was more than twenty years ago, probably when you and I were sharing a squad car. The news never filtered down, not that I knew anything about it at the time, anyway. See you soon.”

They both hung up.

Stone wondered where the remains in the steel drum had ended up.